Saturday, October 3, 2009

For the Greater "Umm, Umm, Good!"

I'm thinking of starting a new 40K army.

I love my Tallarns, don't get me wrong. But as I get closer to having 1500 pts. of fully painted IG, I'm starting to feel a little... restless. My IG are cool, and they win games, but I want to play something else from time to time. And I figure that by January, most of my major IG conversions and painting work will be done. So that would be a good time to start fiddling around with something different.

What might my next army be? I have a short list of the ones I've always wanted to do.

Candidate #1: Thousand Sons

I've always wanted a Tzeentch army. In fact, I used to have a half-painted Lord of Change before I lost it somewhere in the 3 moves I've done since I lived on the West Coast.

Problem is, there's no Thousand Sons codex. And the only way to do a competitive Chaos build with the current codex is to take troops from all of the Gods instead of just one. In fact, there's really only one competitive Chaos build that I ever see anyone take. And I'm not scared of it at all. Oh well.

Candidate #3: Tyrannids

Hey now, here's an army that has a new codex coming out in February. It's even being written by Robin Cruddice, who did such a good job on the Imperial Guard codex. Might I start collecting a bug force? Time to crack open the current book and... hmmnnn...

The models are cool. And the painting would be easy. But I just can't get into them. There's all these confusing mutations and what-not going on. And well... I just can't make myself read very much of it.

There's also the fact that I can't see the army being anything other than a charge-in-headfirst-and-kill-em list, like Orks. And I've got a very similar play style going on with my Chimelta-based IG already. Maybe Robin will change my mind this Winter, but for now I'll give the bugs a pass.

That leaves the final candidate in my suddenly all-too apparent 'T' fetish...

Candidate 3: Tau

Yep, the Tau. They originally came out about 6 months after I started collecting IG, and I've always had a thing for the cool look of their hover tank and Fire Warrior models. Both of the Codexes I have for them are interesting enough to read cover-to-cover, and a few days of hanging out on the Tau forum over at Librarium Online reveals that, personality-wise, I'd fit in just fine, maybe even better than I do with IG. And the play style I'd favor with them would allow me to play in a more Air/Water fashion, where I use infiltrators and other blockers to disrupt and delay the enemy while I blow out their kneecaps from afar. Cool stuff.

Only one problem though. I HATE the faces and hooves of the Tau. Can't stand them at all. They remind me of the Trade Federation aliens in the Star Wars prequels, and that is *not* a good thing!

So... how to make this work? I know! I'll convert them into advanced humans!

Really, it wouldn't be that hard. But how would I paint them? Hehe... try this:

or this:

If you're under 35, these images may make zero sense to you. But it's from a miniseries called "V" that came out in 1983, back when I was a kid and people still respected reporters enough to make them heros in action movies. :)

Anyhow, V is about a bunch of reptilian aliens that come to earth to steal our water and ship our families back home as food, mixed with a lot of cool allegory about the rise of Nazism (Go look at their symbol up top again.). It was also campy as hell and a lot of fun.

And hey, it fits the fluff of the Tau! I mean you have all this "greater good" nonsense they spout all the time, but they really just want your water and some kiddies to snack on. Plus I figure I could paint them in just a couple of weeks. Spray-paint red, paint armor black, paint faces and hair, wash with minwax and done. The tanks would be easy too, as all of their spaceships were white. Just spray, wash, and add a couple of detail colors. :)

I figure I could also proxy a bunch of "real" IG humans in the more khaki colored visitor-youth uniforms as "Re-Kroots". "Snack... er, I mean squad forward for the um, um, good!"

I always thought of the Tau as a cross between Communist China and the Star Wars Trade Federation, with Gundam technology.

In the Grim Gothic world of 40K, I figured 'For the Greater Good' couldn't be the full slogan, It's probably 'For the Greater Good of the Tau Race, and for those lesser races, after the glorious Tau Race has had their fill, they may eat from the scraps of our glorious table.'

I just envision Tau commanders having 'get behind the darkies' stratagems, and telling the humans they will die gloriously 'For the Greater Good', and muttering the rest of the slogan under their breaths as the humans run off to die.

This is a great idea, have you seen the commercials for the remake of V? I'm looking to forward to watching this and the new series, I think I was about 10 maybe 11 when I was watching that show and I loved it!

Try- Mechanicum/Admech armies- Eldar Exodites/mercenaries- A host of Imperial Army forces which give you massive scope for modelling and rules as they lie outside the restrictions of the 40k universe (I have an IA army which features heavy use of robots for instance!) Making some of the human-based forces from the HH books (like the Interex/Laer etc.) is a great idea also!